What are startups spending their capital on? What does the startup tech stack look like? For the most part, one thing is clear: tech titans and industry veterans like Paychex and Salesforce are not popular with startups — startups are instead relying on other startups.

Here are the brands and services that top startups today rely on:

CRM: 61% of startups use Copper (formerly ProsperWorks) for their CRM

Cloud Services: Tech titan Amazon is still king when it comes to cloud and data storage, with a total of 54% of startups using Amazon for Cloud Services

Rideshare: For rideshare travel, and the age-old competition between Uber and Lyft shows Uber with a small leg-up on Lyft: 58% choose to ride Uber for business travel

Customer Support: Intercom is a clear winner for leading startups, with 78% using the customer support software.

Collaboration & Productivity: User-friendliness is a startup must. Startups are investing in collaboration and productivity tools that are more intuitive, well-designed, and user friendly: 62.7% of startups use Trello from for Project Management and 60.5% of startups use Google G Suite instead of Microsoft.

See below for the full results:

*click to expand graphics

Conclusion

Whether you’re a startup in stealth or raising your series B funding, it can be difficult to understand where you should be investing your money and how you compare against your peers.

What we’ve learned is that startups are creating their own ecosystem. They are investing in other startups that mirror their own goals of creating user-friendly, affordable, and innovative solutions for the market.

We hope that our analysis provides insight into how emerging companies are investing in the startup economy and give founders a way to benchmark themselves against top startups as they seek to optimize their hard-won capital.

Methodology

As part of its underwriting process, Brex maintains visibility into the spending of companies that use its products. Brex looked at hundreds of Y-Combinator companies specifically, across a range of pre-seed companies to series B companies from 2017-2018. Y-Combinator is recognized as one of the top investors in highly successful startups. Companies who asked that their data not to be shared were not used, and any company that does not wish to share its data for future aggregated analysis may request to exclude it from being shared in the aggregate.